On March 10th 2017, The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and Indigenous grassroots leaders called upon allies across the United States and around the world to peacefully March on Washington DC. The March on Washington was to exist, resist, and rise in solidarity with the Indigenous peoples of the world whose rights protect mother earth for the future generations of all. The March on Washington was a reaction to the United States government’s unwillingness to be accountable for the construction recent Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) on the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s land. This and other subsequent events such as the election of a new administration, increasing threats to native land, and violence of the police have galvanized indigenous communities in the last four months. Thousands have taken to the streets and to rural sites of political occupation.

Join Marcella Ernest as she discusses the sounds of these protests with Nancy Mithlo. They discuss the noises made by the minds, bodies, and songs of those who have taken to public spaces to confront and object to the current political moment. Understanding the sonic elements of protest helps us to better understand how protest is heard and felt.

–

Marcella Ernest is a Native American (Ojibwe) interdisciplinary video artist and scholar. Her work combines electronic media with sound design with film and photography in a variety of formats; using multi-media installations incorporating large-scale projections and experimental film aesthetics. Currently living in California, Marcella is completing an interdisciplinary Ph.D. in American Studies at the University of New Mexico. Drawing upon a Critical Indigenous Studies framework to explore how “Indianness” and Indigenity are represented in studies of American and Indigenous visual and popular culture, her primary research is an engagement with contemporary Native art to understand how members of colonized groups use a re-mix of experimental video and sound design as a means for cultural and political expressions of resistance.

Nancy Mithlo teaches in the Art History and Visual Arts department at Occidental as an Associate Professor while also working at the Autry in program development, exhibition planning and community outreach. She comes to Occidental from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where she was an Associate Professor of Art History and American Indian studies. Prior to joining the Wisconsin faculty in 2001, Mithlo taught at Smith College, Santa Fe Community College, the University of New Mexico and the Institute of American Arts.

In this podcast, Cynthia Wang shares examples taken from a soundwalk she performed at Disneyland. Disneyland has been an idealized space for the middle-class white American experience, and the aural signals and music used throughout the park encourage visitors to become cultural tourists and to share in this mindset. Here Cynthia considers the moments of rupture that disturb Disney’s controlled soundscape. Join us as we listen for a pathway out of the hyper-consumerist labyrinth of Disney. And, if you would like to learn more about this soundwalk, visit it’s website here.

–

Cynthia Wang is currently a PhD candidate at the Annenberg School of Communication at USC, a USC Endowed Fellow, and a USC Diploma in Innovation grant recipient (for an LGBTQ stories mapping project called GlobaltraQs). Her work is framed in critical cultural perspectives. In the past she has done research on how Asian American musicians use digital media to build community and collaborate, and how crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo provide new avenues of creative production and distribution for independent artists. Her current research seeks to bring health care into this conversation of power, examining how health professionals manage and organize their time throughout the day, using practitioner-facing methods to identify where institutional systems and processes break down through a lens of time and temporality. In particular, she is interested in how communication technologies impact the organization of time and social relations within the health care system while enacting and/or reinforcing hegemonic power dynamics. In addition to research and academic stuffs, Cynthia is also a singer-songwriter, and just released her EP album (Find it on iTunes, Amazon, or wherever else you get your music).

In honor of Record Store Day (4/21!!!!) our latest podcast investigates what it means to inhabit the most profound of listening spaces, the record store. While we have done some written investigation of this space–see Jacqueline Dowdell’s January post “The Specialty Record Shop”–this podcast is an aural collage/conversation between music lovers of many stripes: academics, record store owners and employees, and artists. This is a discussion about analog space in a digital age, and all the broken jewel cases in-between. Themes of desire, consumption, community, and aesthetics drift amidst the respondents as they address the magical space of the record shop through their lived experience.

Benjamin Gold is a freelance writer from New Jersey. His thoughts on music and movies haven’t been published in that many places, but Askmen.com and PLANET° seem to like his work.

Rebecca Berkowitzis a DJ at the 90.3 The Core (WVPH Piscataway). You can tune in to her show at thecore.fm between 8PM and 10PM on Mondays.

Eric Lott teaches American Studies in the English department at The University of Virginia.

Quinn Bishop is the owner and operator of Houston’s oldest and most active independent music store, Cactus Music.

Jennifer Stoever-Ackermanis co-founder, Editor-in-Chief and Guest Posts Editor for Sounding Out! She is also Assistant Professor of English at Binghamton University and a Fellow at the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University.

Miranda Taylor plays drums in a band called Black Wine, and is also the voice (and beat) behind Sounding Out!’s podcast introduction, which she recorded with her old band Hunchback.

Andrew Leland is co-editor of The Believer magazine. He speaks here with Dave Truesdell, who now staffs the Recorded Sound Collection at the University of Missouri’s Ellis Library, about Truesdell’s time working at various record stores in Columbia, Missouri.

—

Aaron Trammell is co-founder and multimedia editor of Sounding Out! He is also a Media Studies PhD candidate at Rutgers University.